Organization is important, because it is all about making room for the things in our life that are important to us. It’s about creating space — physical and mental — for living out our values. So for example, if you value health, it helps to have a tidy, orderly kitchen where you have room to cook healthy meals each day. If you value relationships, it helps to have a calendar system so you can easily make dates to see friends and family.
But it can feel overwhelming to try to get every aspect of your life and every room in your house organized all at once. So here are simple steps you can take right now to make your life feel more organized:
1 At your desk, take all of your loose papers and stack them up. Why? This will do two things. One, it will instantly clear space on your desk so you have a place to work. And two, it will make it easier to sort through those papers one-by-one. Having papers scattered over a large area tends to make our brains shut down when we consider organizing them. But going through papers in a neat stack calms our brains down and reminds us to deal with just one piece of paper — one decision — at a time.
2 Make your bed. It will instantly transform your room from depressing dungeon to relaxing refuge. You deserve a nice, comfortable place to sleep after a hard day’s work!
3 Put a clothes hamper in every bedroom and in your main bathroom. This will remind you to throw dirty clothes and towels in the hamper, instead of letting them pile up on the floor. It will also make it so much easier when you go to do laundry. Just grab the clothes from the hamper and throw them in the washing machine. No more bending and searching around for lost clothing!
4 In your bathroom, grab anything and everything covered with dust and throw it away. The dust is how you know you aren’t using it! Good-bye old, smelly candles and funky perfume bottles.
5 Hang your clothes on the closet rod grouped together by category (e.g. hang all of the long-sleeve blouses together, hang all of the short-sleeve blouses together, etc.) This will make it so much easier and faster to get dressed in the morning, because you will be able to instantly find that blouse that you are looking for. For extra credit, arrange each category of clothing in rainbow order so you can get that boutique look. This will also help you realize where you are buying too much of the same thing (I’m talking about YOU, little black skirts!)
6 In your kitchen, grab a big box and start opening cabinets and drawers, throwing anything into the box that you haven’t used in a year. Don’t worry about organizing the drawers or cabinets. Just remove the dead weight. Afterward, donate the box to Goodwill or a local family shelter.
7 Go to your pantry with a trash bag and working left from right starting with the top shelf, pitch everything that is expired. Can’t find an expiration date? Then pitch anything you can’t identify (like mysterious powders from the bulk section of the grocery store) or haven’t used in a year.
Still feeling overwhelmed? Call in one of our reSPACEd organizers to kick-start your organizing project. We can come in for just one session to get you started or work alongside you from start to finish. We are here to help!
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